ADHD- Why I would never trust a teacher with a gun: I heard about some kids planning on cutting class to protest the school shooting in Florida, & it's still winter, & I humored the idea of them getting rained on. ADHD- A large number of kids staged a walk out my senior year of high school, and they got rained on. Ya see, the radicalist christian school board in that tiny Texas community tried to ban Satanism, heavy metal music, long hair, etc. This caused a few of the teachers to take up the mantle of antisemitism, because they apparently couldn't tell the difference between a star of David & a pentagram. Naturally, this raised the contempt of a single Jewish teacher, who often took out her frustrations on the students. I found out that the following year, she got one of the vice principles fired for allowing prayer groups to meet on campus after school hours, and the year after that, stole a donation can from some kids trying to go on some trip, and she hasn't been seen or heard from since. My point? They're not just "Human", They're stuck up and twice as crazy. With age does not necessarily come wisdom. Sometimes, age shows up alone.

Most militant creationists I've met have seemed intellectually limited, but I do question how blindly and chaotically nature alone could have engineered some of the wonders in existence, even something like the eye. When I've said this about the eye to others in science they've tended to pompously regurgitate what they've been told in class or read in a text, and do it arrogantly, as if they originally made those explanatory observations, and they've failed to truly think about the wonder of what an eye does. How could chaos create the precision of an eye? Repeating what you've been told is not necessarily a sign of brilliance, and I took a lot of flak in school for questioning pat answers from the scientific catechism, naively thinking science was about curiosity and questioning.

Another problem is the transitory species that bridged flightless species who are said to have evolved flight. The best explanation to this point by biologists is flappy limbs may have been insect-catchers, and over time the limbs elongated into wings. No evidence for this in the fossil record, exactly, but it's the going theory to cover how evolution produced flight, and it rings hollow.

Survival of the fittest, natural selection, the ongoing development of species, of course these things are reality, and only fools deny them. Evolution is very real, but how life began and was it guided, are we all some experiment with an end, that;s what preoccupies me.

To me the concept of some guiding force seems more supportable than to assign the cause to action and reaction and say it somehow lucked out and made human beings and life-supporting atmospheres and an interconnected biome that sustains life in all its diversity.

One thing I absolutely believe is I don't think religions have a monopoly on the idea of some sort of creation, and I don't think they get it right, the idea of universal design does not belong to them, and they close down all debate on the matter by being dogmatic and driving people away. But then again I don't think science has figured it out yet either, and may not unless scientists become less defensive and quit lashing out at religion, which should not be science's enemy or its equal. Seek truth and don't be distracted by others seeking on their own, that's how I look at it all.

My family is watching La La Land. It is not yet five minutes old and I hate it already. Its worse than that thing with Mr Leapy Legs they were watching the other day that I've forgotten the name of already.

Logged

But do you understand That none of this will matter Nothing can take your pain away

A small tornado hit east of us last night around midnight, setting off our sirens and waking the little ones up, and today instead of spending the afternoon over with their paternal grandparents, as the children do every Sunday, we drove first to see the high water mark of the worst flooding around here since 1997, simply an awe-generating sight all that water, then went and beheld where the tornado struck in a rural setting not far from some land we own out that way, a nine-acre spread we imaginatively dub our farm. (There is nothing on this land but trees, stickers and thorns, and an unholy conglomeration of ticks.)

All we had to do to find the tornado's path was drive toward the sound of a hundred chain saws running at once.

We could go gawk with a good conscience since it was an F-0 (seventy mile an hour winds, they think though a concentrated funnel) and no one was hurt and damage was minor, though there was a lot pink fiberglass insulation scattered in treetops and some branches were hanging and a shed took a beating and in the metal sides where it was blown apart like a bomb hit, you could literally see the twisting motion that was within the wind, it was like a giant hand grabbed the shed and gave it a crumple. Pretty cool in a wow what a shame kind of way.

The path was there to be followed and was easy to pick out, it stayed on the ground for ten minutes and traveled six miles, ironically through a town called Hammersville (it got hammered...?) though the storm weakened as it went, and the weirdest sight was a child's plastic slide hanging twenty feet up in a tree, dangling, no serious structural damage or I would not have suggested we five go see since I wouldn't want to look on at others' misfortune.

After an afternoon like that, we're settling in and I helped my daughter build a new blue-green MTG deck, and next I'm going to teach my son how to do laundry. One fewer person for whom to do clothes? Ah, you see, life gets better...

FYIDick's Sporting Goods quit selling "assault style rifles" six years ago.A subsidiary of theirs, Field & Stream is going to stop selling "assault style rifles".Dick's Sporting Goods is going to continue selling the kind of hunting shotguns like the one they once sold to Nikolas Cruz.

In other words, Dick's Sporting Goods' announcement this afternoon is just a hypocritical marketing ploy to make their overpriced running shoes more attractive to leftist snobs.